


share the same space for a minute or two

by moonrocks



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Comfort, Fluff, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 03:48:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21009239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonrocks/pseuds/moonrocks
Summary: After yet another tedious day of Road School, Bill and Holden retire to a motel in Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Ohio to find that the room they booked only has one bed.Bill is stubborn, Holden is a brat, and healthy male bonding ensues.





	share the same space for a minute or two

**Author's Note:**

> This occurs sometime in the early half of season one, probably in one of those Fincherian road trip montages.
> 
> This has absolutely nothing to do with my other works which are otherwise connected, and for all intents and purposes, this doesn't exist in my MCU (Mindhunter Cinematic Universe). This is pure self-indulgence at its finest.

Holden is asleep in the passenger side of the car, crumpled up against the door, his cheeks pink with the cold and his forehead pressed up to the window. His steady breath fogs in a circle on the snowflake freckled glass, their melting crystalline shapes half-visible in the headlights of the cars infrequently passing them on the highway, heading the opposite way.

A wrinkled map of the I-70 is opened across Holden's lap like a makeshift blanket. He was giving Bill directions to the motel before he passed out after another tedious day of Road School drudgery.

Most of their afternoon was spent teaching the ways of FBI investigation to local law enforcement in Greenfield, Indiana, a town small enough to be left off less detailed state maps. Many of the officers were more reluctant than usual to sit in a stuffy room and stare at projector slides. A snowstorm was in the forecast. It made those on duty that weekend more fidgety and less cooperative than usual as they anticipated the task ahead, clearing the streets and sidewalks and being on call for possible road accidents or power outages.

Halfway through the lecture, Bill could tell Holden was losing his patience instructing a class of unwilling students, and the harder he went with the dull technical jargon the less they paid attention. As a result, he eventually let Bill take the lead, sitting on a desk off to the side with arms crossed, watching with half-hidden disgruntlement.

He looks peaceful now, however, which is very unlike him. At any point during the day, Bill can usually glance over at Holden and see that look he always has on his face, eyes blank but busy beneath the surface, like every thought he could possibly think is running through his head all at once. Right now is an odd moment of quiet and much-needed calm. His eyes are closed, eyelashes fluttering minutely whenever the light from another car or a truck stop along the highway passes over his face, his mouth hanging slightly open. If Bill turned down the radio, he could probably hear him snore.

_Dreams_ by Fleetwood Mac drifts fuzzily across the airwaves and Bill wishes it were summer, wishes he had an early morning tee time at some Southern state golf course and a beer slippery with condensation in his hand. He itches for a cigarette, just to feel some sort of warmth, but December in the rural Midwest means snowbanks piled up past your knees and temperatures that dip below zero. The weather is too cold and the wind too brutal to roll down the window. Normally, Bill would light up inside the car, but knowing Holden he would probably go out of his way to wake up just to complain about the second-hand smoke.

To stave off the craving, Bill focuses on the road ahead of him, barely visible in the bluster, blackness swallowing the space stretching beyond the reach of the headlights. The car never catches up to it and the highway goes on and on and on. Bill swears the town sign they pass reads Middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, Ohio.

Eventually, Bill spots the muffled, cherry red glow of a motel sign peeking through the snowfall on the side of the interstate. The words NO VACANCY cut through the haze, and Bill is glad they called in advance. He pulls into the parking lot, snow crunching underneath the tires, and looks over at his partner, still asleep.

“Holden, wake up.”

Bill reaches over and places a hand on his shoulder to gently jostle him. When that fails to wake him, he does it again, harder this time. He pats him on the cheek.

“Holden, come on. Rise and shine.”

Sometimes all it takes is a light breeze to wake him, other times he might as well be a corpse in one of the several autopsy photos they show in class.

Bill sighs, his breath a white haze dissolving in the air around him, and grabs his mostly empty pack of cigarettes from the dash. He tosses it at Holden. It ricochets off the side of his head and anticlimactically falls to the floor mat. After a moment, Holden stirs from sleep, wide eyes blinking like a newborn deer and noodly limbs stiffening as he rights himself in his seat.

“Did you say something?” Holden asks, oblivious, face screwed up in delayed confusion and still marred by sleep. He yawns. The hair at the front of his head is mussed. It almost looks curly. Bill is annoyed at himself for noticing. “Did I pass out?”

Bill smirks and points to the map laid out over his legs. “Good thing I knew where I was going.”

Holden grimaces then folds up the map and sticks it in the glovebox.

They get out of the car, grabbing their bags from the backseat. Holden shrinks in on himself when the cold fully hits him. He grips his elbows to pull his coat tighter around him while Bill finally has his cigarette. He inhales slow and savours the hit of nicotine that swarms his head, warm in his lungs.

The motel looks leftover from the fifties. MOTOR LODGE INN stretches across the roof of the single floor office in large block letters, turquoise paint chipping with age in an ode to all things dilapidated and mid-century modern. The rest of the motel is painted an ugly shade of bubble gum pink, like Pepto Bismol, despite its less than happy-go-lucky appearance. Just from the outside, it looks like the floors will creak on their own and a draft will seep from under the door no matter how many towels you shove beneath it.

Bill sees the flicker of a silhouette pass in the orangey glow that pours through the sole window of the office. The snow around them shimmers like glitter glue in the light. Everything is so still, like the snowflakes are sucking the air of all sound, like a vacuum, existing within a snow globe filled with antifreeze and balls of styrofoam.

“Does Norman Bates work here?” Holden deadpans, breaking up the calm. “Can we go inside before I freeze to death?”

“After you,” Bill says, motioning him forward with a flick of ash from his cigarette.

The motel office is a welcome stowaway from the cold, warm and homey despite their first impressions. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling in honey brown shiplap and decorated with stock photographs of sparrows and other songbirds. An Elvis memorial calendar from 1977 looks oddly out of place above the cash register, the month flipped to June. The radiator clacks away in one corner, while in the other corner a brassy gramophone plays a Patsy Cline 45. Her crooning draws a dreamy curtain over the room and when Bill looks behind his shoulder, Holden is stifling another yawn.

Bill walks to the front desk and rings the bell. The carpet wet with melted slush squelches beneath his shoes.

“Just a minute,” comes a woman's voice, thick with a stereotypically Midwestern accent.

A minute passes.

“You ever been here before?” Holden asks, setting his bag down by the door and leaning up against the front desk beside Bill.

“This motel?” Bill says, then takes another drag of his cigarette. The smoke tickles his nose. “No, but it looks the same as every other one on this interstate.”

“I meant Ohio.”

Bill can tell Holden is on one of his small talk tangents, where he asks polite but trivial questions to hide how uncomfortable he is stewing in the silence.

“Yeah, more than a few times while running Road School,” Bill answers, regarding him with bemusement. “I passed through once when I was in the military, after I transferred to Fort Sill.”

“Right, you were in the army,” Holden realizes. “You never talk about it.”

Bill is halfway through saying “Why would I?” when the backroom door teeters open on rusted hinges.

A woman, pushing seventy at least, shuffles into the main office wearing shaggy pink slippers. Her hair is too blonde and bouffant to be anything but a wig and it reveals itself as such when she adjusts the gingham bandana around her head and her hairline inches down her forehead. Round, oversized glasses enlarge her eyes creased with smile lines, making them look like bulging bubbles ready to burst. The nametag pinned to her housecoat reads Geraldine.

She looks at Holden then Bill, then leans over the desk to glance out the ice frosted window. She rights herself and points to her left with one wrinkled finger, nail brightly painted phlox purple. “The sign says no vacancy.”

“We booked in advance,” Bill assures.

“It should be under Ford,” Holden chimes in.

“No, Tench,” Bill corrects.

Holden shoots Bill a look. Geraldine takes off her glasses to examine the list of bookings on a clipboard in front of her, dragging her finger slowly down the page. Bill grows impatient, his tiredness sitting heavily on his shoulders, and the pull of his cigarette only makes him sleepier. As soon as they get into their room, Bill wants to collapse into bed without another word from Holden or himself for the next six to eight hours.

“Tench, Tench, Tench. Ah, here we are.” Geraldine sets the clipboard down and turns to the large key rack behind her to grab their room key. She hands it to Bill. She smiles, lips purply pink to match her fingernails. “Enjoy.”

Holden picks his bag up from the floor and follows Bill to their room, the cold snapping at their heels again.

“Why is the room always in your name?” Holden asks as they arrive at their door, room number six, the sign screwed in slightly off-kilter.

Bill fiddles with the keys. “Ask whatever secretary Shepard gets to book these things,” he says. “Maybe when we have the funding for separate rooms you can hear Geraldine read out your name.”

Holden rolls his eyes and Bill finally gets the key to turn in the lock. The door creaks open and they shuffle into the room. He reaches around in the dark for the light switch.

“You would think by now,” Holden continues, “we would have our own—”

Light floods the room. Their eyes are immediately drawn to the center of the room to the bed, singular, draped in a grandmotherly pink floral quilt, the bed skirt white and lacey like a coffee table doily.

“—beds?” Holden finishes.

His sentence trails off into a sigh of exasperation.

They make their way back to the motel office.

Bill rings the bell a second time. Holden brushes snowflakes off his coat. After several minutes of waiting, Geraldine comes out of the backroom, the time without her wig, her ashy gray hair tucked away in bright pink curlers.

“I think there’s been a mistake,” Bill says.

She narrows her eyes at him and the craggy lines on her face deepen. “What mistake?”

Bill lowers his voice as if to stave off the embarrassment. “Our room only has one bed. You must have given us the wrong room key.”

Geraldine takes out the same clipboard and looks through it. “No, I got it right. Room number six. It says right here.”  
  
She holds up the list to show him and Bill tries not to lose his patience. He looks back at Holden hovering in the doorway to distance himself from the situation, the hint of a smirk on his face as he watches Bill struggling to set things straight.

“Are there any other rooms available?”

“The sign says no vacancy,” she points out, become less and less amused. “What’s the big deal? During the Depression, my family all shared one bed. Mothers, daughters, siblings.” She looks between Bill and Holden. “Fathers and sons.”

Bill presses his tongue against his cheek. “Ma’am, my partner and I are with the FBI.”

Her thin eyebrows disappear beneath the roller at the front of her head as she raises them. “Family business then?”

Bill minutely shakes his head while Holden curls his bottom lip into his mouth to stifle his laughter. It only annoys Bill more.

Geraldine crosses her arms. “Sorry, all our other rooms are full. It happens around the holidays.”

“What are all those then?” In a last-ditch effort, Bill points to the rack on the opposite wall scattered with room keys that sway in the draft of the fan spinning lazily on the ceiling.

“Spares.” She purses her lips, her expression displeased. “Goodnight, Mr. Tench.”

They return to their room, neither one of them saying much of anything. Bill closes the door but leaves it unlocked while Holden rifles through his suitcase.

He goes to the bathroom with his toiletries bag in hand and five minutes later comes back out wearing a grey workout sweater and pyjama bottoms, toothbrush hanging from the side of his mouth, a bit of artificially green toothpaste smeared across his upper lip. His cheeks are red and his hairline slightly dampened from washing his face, stray strands sticking to his forehead.

Bill remains in his suit with his shoes still on, his tie loosened an inch around his neck, one button undone, collar rumpled. He sits on the end of the bed and faces the snowflake dusted window, weighing his options. Holden settles on the opposite side of the mattress and the springs creak. It sounds much louder than it should.

Bill turns around and catches Holden pulling back the bedsheets.

“Absolutely fucking not.”

“What?” Holden mumbles around the toothbrush clamped between his front teeth.

Bill glares at him. “We’re not sleeping in the same bed.”

Holden says nothing at first, shrugging him off, and continues brushing his teeth. He disappears back into the bathroom, runs the tap, gurgles and spits. Bill can hear him ripping off a piece of floss.

“Well, it’s too cold out to sleep in the car,” he finally says. “It’s a queen-sized bed. There should be enough room.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Bill rubs at his eyes and lowers his voice. “She gave us the damn honeymoon suite.”

Holden snorts. “Fine, you can sleep on the floor.”

“Do you want me to throw my back out?” Bill counters.

“You’re the one who has a problem with it.”

“Come on, Holden. Weren’t you a Boy Scout as a kid? It’ll be like camping.”

Holden pokes his head out of the bathroom. “Eagle Scout actually.”

“Holden,” Bill warns.  
  
“Alright, fine.”

They trade places. Bill goes into the bathroom to strip down to his undershirt and boxers and brush his teeth. When he comes back out, Holden is pulling the bedspread off the mattress and Bill realizes how much cooler the room is without his jacket.

“What are you doing?” Bill asks.

“If you get the bed, I get the blankets,” Holden says without looking up as he strips the bed. He throws the spare pillow onto the floor with a comical thump as if to illustrate his point, quilt folded under his arm.

“When did I agree to that?”

“When you told me I had to sleep on the floor,” Holden deadpans. “Do you know how many germs there are on a motel room carpet?”

Bill rolls his eyes, his tiredness draining him of all sympathy. He just wants to get at least six hours of shuteye before they have to be on the road again in the morning. He crosses the room to flick on the bedside lamp then turns off the ceiling light.

“Can you turn on the radiator?” he asks before Holden settles into his makeshift sleeping bag.

A smirk nearly upturns the corners of Holden’s mouth. Bill can see him biting the inside of his cheek to keep it away. “It is on.”

“Are you sure?”

“I checked.”

Without another word, Bill gets into bed.

He pulls the tissue paper-thin sheet up to his chin in a useless attempt to shield himself from the cold, while Holden makes himself comfortable on the floor or at least tries to. He shifts, tucking the quilt underneath his legs and patting his pillow to fluff it, then shifts again. He lays on his left side, then his right side, then on his stomach, then his left side again until he finally rolls over onto his back. He stays there, looking uncomfortable and unamused, lips pressed into a thin line, eyes half-lidded with sleep but no less annoyed.

“Goodnight.”

Bill turns off the light. “Goodnight.”

They lay there in silence. Bill shuts his eyes and tries to count sheep, but the cold is a distraction from any drowsiness he feels. The radiator rattles unpleasantly but does little, and he can hear the plink of snowflakes against the window, which only makes his lack of blankets more unbearable. Bill shrinks in on himself, folds his arms across his chest to keep his warmth close to his body.

Maybe fifteen minutes pass, or maybe an hour or two. Time slows like molasses as Bill listens to the quiet hitch of Holden breathing, unsteady and shallow, an indication that he’s just as wide awake as Bill is.

Bill checks the alarm clock. 1:31 AM. The blocky numbers glow candy red in the dark as he considers turning it face down on the table. He itches for a cigarette.

“Are you still awake?” Holden asks after a moment.

“No,” Bill grumbles, half-muffled by the pillow.

A few more minutes pass. Bill tosses and turns. Sleep pulls him close but never overtakes him, so eventually, he sits up and rustles around for the pack of cigarettes he set on the bedside table. He lights up and blows smoke rings in the bluish haze of the dark. The tobacco does nothing to soothe his insomnia, but his lungs burn pleasantly. It keeps him from shivering.

Despite himself, he glances down at Holden on the floor. The blankets are wrapped around him like a cacoon as he lays on his back, eyes glued to the water-stained stucco ceiling. His toes, doubled up in two pairs of socks, stick out from the bottom. He looks warm, if not stiffly positioned.

Holden catches him looking. “Are you cold?”

Bill takes a drag of his cigarette. “Yes.”

“We can put a pillow between us.”

“No.”

A pause. Maybe five minutes long. Maybe twenty.

“Bill, can I ask you something?” Holden begins and the smug intonation of his voice tells Bill that he should brace himself for whatever is coming next. “Are you afraid of intimacy? Emotional and or physical?”

Bill knows Holden is mockingly analyzing him like they do their subjects just to get on his nerves—like he always seems to with ease—but embarrassment and anger at being embarrassed still burns his ears and the back of his neck.

“Holden, are you afraid of getting your neck wrung?” Bill replies, blinking into the darkness, and Holden stifles a laugh. “You just have your panties in a twist because I'm making you sleep on the floor.”

“Maybe so but like you said, Boy Scouts sleep on the ground all the time.” Bill can almost hear Holden's smirk pouring through his voice. “I have to get my badge for assisting the elderly somehow.”

Bill pinches his cigarette between his teeth. “You’re really pushing it, you know.”

“That check-in lady thought you were my father.”

“She was obviously senile.”

“Bill,” Holden warns, and the abrupt transition between his teasing and sudden earnestness almost makes Bill smile.

“Can you try the radiator again?” he asks instead.

Bill hears some shuffling around as Holden climbs out of the heap of blankets with a huff and fiddles with the knobs. It does nothing but make the radiator clank louder.

“We have to be up in less than six hours,” Bill groans, just about desperate enough to pull his shoes on and sleep in the car. “I can’t guarantee I won’t swerve into oncoming traffic if I have to make the trip back running on fumes.”

Holden sits back on his heels. They share a look and their insomnia marred expressions tell Bill all he needs to know about what he needs to do.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Holden repeats, eyebrows raised with skepticism and amusement.

“Yes, okay.” Bill moves over, making room on the bed. He butts his cigarette out in the ashtray. “Get over here before I change my mind.”

Holden stands, gathers the blankets from off the floor and tosses them onto the mattress. Bill is relieved as he rights them on the bed and pulls them over his legs. Holden lays down, putting a spare pillow between them like he said he would, but Bill can still feel his warmth radiating through the sheets.

He wonders if he should say goodnight again—hopefully for the last time before they head out on the road again—but it sticks in his throat, the overwhelming closeness ensuring that anything he could say now would come out awkward and stilted.

Holden is turned away from him, comfortably settled on his side with his knees bent toward his chest. Bill stares at the back of his head, at his hair rumpled from the press of his pillow, and listens to his breathing as it steadies and slows, wondering why he made such a fuss about sharing when this feels just as natural as Holden sitting beside him in the passenger seat of his car.

Bill closes his eyes, counts the ticks of the analog clock on the wall and thinks about home to distract himself from the fact that his FBI partner is asleep beside him, less than an arm’s reach away.

Several minutes later, Bill is halfway to sleep himself when a car rips through the parking lot, headlights seeping through the lacy curtains and briefly illuminating the room, the outline of the windows cast in bright rectangles against the ugly yellowing wallpaper. After a moment, the night settles back into the lull of placidity and Bill releases the tension he was holding in his shoulders. Then somewhere down the street, the car backfires and the sound perforates the silence and Holden startles awake. He abruptly props himself up on his elbows, eyes wide and brows knitted together, hair sticking up every which way.

“Holden?” Bill asks, more confused than concerned until he notices the rapid rise and fall of Holden's chest and he feels oddly protective. He instinctively moves to put a hand on Holden's shoulder but stops himself midway, presses his palm into the mattress and sits up against the headboard. “Holden, what the hell?”

Holden seems to relax a little as Bill's voice disrupts the airless quiet. “Sorry, I, uh, the car startled me,” he says softly as he eases his breath. “Did I wake you?”

“No, I was up,” Bill assures, squinting his eyes, trying to better make out the shape of Holden in the dark. “Are you okay?”

Holden nods but looks unconvinced of it himself. Bill watches him carefully, craving another cigarette. He finds his half-empty pack on the nightstand and lights up as Holden settles back into the mattress, eyes trained on the ceiling. The sweat on his brow is lit by the spark of Bill's lighter and the end of his cigarette as he inhales and it glows tangerine orange.

“Nightmare?” Bill asks, and he's not sure why he's asking, only that Holden is wide awake now and sitting in the silence and Bill might suffocate if no one says anything at all.

“No, not exactly,” Holden sounds closed off like he always does when Bill prods at something too personal, like his relationship with his parents or where exactly he grew up.

“For a second, you looked like some of the boots at Fort Sill who were freshly discharged from Vietnam,” Bill says, thinking an anecdote might break the tension and wistful for a time when he was much younger and his uniform was army greens and aviators instead of grey suits and tacky ties Nancy bought him for his birthday. “Blank eyes, looking but not really seeing anything, you know.”

“Well, the draft missed me by a year,” Holden replies. “I was still in high school.” A pause swells between them. “Bill, can I ask you something?”

Bill takes another drag of his cigarette, waits until the smoke goes stale in his mouth and dissipates in the air before answering. “I guess that depends.”

“Depends on what?”

Bill looks at him with eyebrows raised, but Holden is still staring elsewhere. “Are you going to ask me if I’m afraid of emotional intimacy again?”

Holden exhales, part laugh, part sigh. “No. It’s something else.”

“Promise?”

Bill is kidding, but in a moment of sober earnestness that likens him to someone even more naive, Holden says, “Yes, I promise.”

Bill feels something indistinguishable stir in his chest, maybe affection, maybe annoyance, maybe a combination of the two. “Okay, go ahead.”

Holden rolls over onto his side, finally looking up at Bill who is still sitting up in bed beside him. He presses his ear to the very edge of his pillow and his nose is dangerously close to brushing Bill’s elbow. It just makes Bill all the more glad that the lights are off and the curtains are drawn. The darkness allows for a kind of anonymity that lessens the feeling of closeness or, at least, the embarrassment and shame that comes with it. In the daytime, Bill would feel naked underneath Holden’s gaze, small and insignificant and laid bare, but in the dark the space between them is stretched and less contained. They are heads with no bodies sharing secrets in the night without expectation that their conversation will mean anything in the morning, not with both feet raised off the ground.

“Does the work we do ever keep you awake at night?” Holden finally asks, hesitant and apprehensive as the words leave his mouth.

Bill blinks at him, not sure if he had any expectations of what Holden would ask but sure enough to know that the question catches him off-guard. “I know some of the diner food we eat does,” Bill quips, his first instinct always to dismiss anything too serious by burying it underneath a layer of irony.

He can almost hear Holden roll his eyes in response. “Bill, you know what I mean.”

Bill fiddles with his cigarette as Holden shifts beside him, staring at him expectantly, goading him to answer.

“It happens in this line of work,” Bill says, giving in a little too easily on account of how exhausted he is and how much he wants Holden to stop looking at him like that, tearing him apart. “Some of the things you see just never really leave your head.” He shrugs, glances at Holden to find that he has already looked away. “I would ask you the same question but I think I know the answer.”

“Do you?”

Bill shrugs. “The amount of gory crime scene photos we go through on a day to day basis and you never even flinch.”

“Photographs are much easier to deal with than the alternative,” Holden says, voice lowered. “Has anyone ever died right in front of you?”

“Jesus, Holden, if this is your version of pillowtalk I feel bad for your girlfriend,” Bill says in disbelief and he immediately feels the weight of Holden’s glare. He sighs. “Yes, to answer your question, I have. Is this what all that was about? Was it really the car that startled you?”

Holden takes his time answering. He readjusts and the sheets crinkle and swish. Bill chain-smokes, breathes in and out as sleep threatens to overtake him but he keeps himself awake, waiting for Holden to spit it out so they both can get some rest before heading back on the road.

“A few months before I met you, I was called in to handle a hostage situation,” Holden says. He sounds tense, like his throat is constricted, corners of his mouth pulled tight. “The perp blew his head off about twenty feet away from me. Sometimes I can still hear the sound of the shotgun going off in my ears.”

With that, Bill regards Holden with renewed sensitivity. He carefully looks him over, rationalizing away the urge to touch his shoulder again, soothe him like he might Brian after a nightmare. “Why are you telling me this, Holden?”

“I don't know.” Holden shakes his head at himself. “I guess because it’s two in the morning and you asked if I was okay and I thought you might understand.”

“Right,” Bill says, trying not to match Holden’s defensiveness with more resistance. “I was like that for a while after I got discharged from the army, but it goes away.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Bill insists. “If the things we saw always stayed with us, I don't think anyone would sleep.”

Maybe his imagination is twisting shadows in the dark, but Bill thinks he sees Holden inch closer at that. His warmth is there again, threatening to pull Bill in or swallow him whole.

“Do cigarettes help you sleep?” Holden asks quietly.

He sounds so goddamn innocent that Bill wants to tease him mercilessly for it, but something stops him. A feeling, hot and overwhelming, settles like a handful of pebbles in the pit of his stomach, something like need, the need to be seen through the dark, felt through the sheets.

“Not really,” Bill says, willfully ignoring it, forcing his eyes to the floor beside the bed where Holden had been laying before.

“Then why smoke when you can't sleep?” Holden is nearly whispering now and it makes the feeling in Bill's stomach that much worse.

“It's something to do.” Bill takes a slow drag as if to illustrate his point, holds it in his mouth, exhales. The nicotine rush burns dull in comparison to having Holden’s eyes on him. “Watch the smoke curl in the dark.”

Before he can react, Holden is reaching past the pillow that he shoved between them for the cigarette clutched in Bill’s hand. Bill watches with amusement as Holden slots it between his lips, the nub glowing as he inhales. It briefly illuminates the lower half of his face. Then he exhales, smoke like beckoning fingers dancing in the space around him, motioning towards Bill, begging him to come closer but receiving no reply. For a moment, the air is quiet and still with a film of tobacco haze, but then Holden lets out a series of coughs, short in their succession but emerging deep from his lungs, ineffectively stifled by the back of his hand.

Bill smirks, not knowing what Holden expected. When Holden regains his composure he grimaces and hands the cigarette back to Bill. Their fingers brush.

“That was awful,” Holden complains.

Bill’s smirk threatens to break into a smile, wide and bright for once. “It's an acquired taste.”

“Well, so is cancer.”

“And so are you.”

The dark conceals it, but Bill thinks Holden smiles. He bites down around the cigarette again and the tip is slightly wet with saliva, maybe from him but maybe from Holden. Bill wants to take another drag, taste what Holden tasted—taste _him_—but instead he stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray and falls back against the pillows. Holden is turned away from him again and soon his breath is at an even pace.

Bill follows close behind.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much to Frankie for looking this over!
> 
> And thanks for reading.


End file.
